05.03.2012, 00:46
Hey guys: Keinmann is back!!! That's right, CoD finally got me back into the IL-2 scene! :-)
I picked up CoD at Best Buy over the weekend for $54. I was very worried that the sim would suck due to many negative reviews I saw online. One of the things that worried me most was the reported "Steam-ization" of the game. But I looked all over the back of the box and read the system requirements, and it said nothing about Steam! If it had, I probably would have done what I do every time I picked up a cool-looking game and see "Steam account required" on it: put it back on the shelf and walk away. So I bought CoD and went on my merry way home, hoping that the months that had passed since release day had brought some good bug fixes and patches.
When I got home I was FURIOUS when I saw Steam pop up on my screen, and I said to myself "This *BETTER* be worth it!" It was a pain to set the game up, as always with Steam(ing Poo). After I got the game installed I had to sit up for 5hrs and 24mins for a lousy Steam update -- so I didn't even get to try CoD until after 6am! When I finally got to playing, the first difficult thing was getting my control system set up. I have a joystick + throttle and rudder pedal setup, and it took me a while to tweak everyhing out: no big deal, because original IL-2 was the same way. Then I spent some time fiddling with graphics settings, testing some planes and "breaking in" the sim...
The first thing I realized when trying my first complete "solo" in the 109E was that this was NOT the old IL-2! Whoa, my engine won't crank at the press of a button!
hock: It took me a second to realize the game had clickable cockpits and almost everything was operable and life-like! Not to worry: I know the 109 cockpit like the back of my hand. Open fuel, full open water & oil radiators, squeeze a little fuel down the line, open the canopy, lean out and get a good look around my plane, switch on my magnetos, full toe brakes, throttle at 5% and fire it up! By now I'd already realized how complex "Complex Engine Management" was in CoD, because I'd done a few "quick missions" in Hurris and Spits and burned them up lol... so I knew to let the engine warm up a second. Once I was up to 40C on my oil I was satisfied, and I locked my toes down on the brakes, powered up and let go. I was bouncing up and down as I rolled forward, and I thought to myself: "WOW! This is nice!". Some nose-heavy trim and a little forward pressure on the stick and my tail was up, and I was keepin 'er straight with rudder. Just like the real thing, I didn't need to pull up once I got to speed: she just lifts off into the air and you need to cut power, trim down and raise the gear.
I took it out over the channel and got a little alt under my wings, and tried some basic maneuvers. MUCH more life-like than the original IL-2!!! I feel like I'm flying the real thing; save G-force effects on my physical body and not actually dying when bullets hit me lol. The CEM in this sim is truly a blast, and very well done. Only the anthropomorphic control thing annoys me. It's not that bad in the 109, but sometimes it can just be silly. Like when you're lowering your slow *** flaps on a landing approach and desperately need to add throttle, by the foolish pilot just keeps on rolling out the flaps and stalls and crashes. It really kills me (quite literally) in the Hurricane. But now that I'm used to it, it's not so bad in the 109.
After flying around a few minutes over the Channel, I came back in to land. Just like the start-up and takeoff procedure, landing also felt very life-like and was much more impressive than the old IL-2! I made quite a beautiful landing for my first 109 flight ever in this sim. It could've been better, but it wasn't bad. I wonder, how many other people land their first time without mishap or incident?! :wink: I actually made a video of the entire flight with FRAPS, and have it on my spare HDD (I'll show it off if anyone wants to see heheh).
Now that I've got quite a few sleepless hours of gameplay under my exhausted belt, I must say that this sim is pretty damn good!
I think that either the negative reviews were overdone, or the latest updates/patches have rectified most/many of the things which grieved our fellow simmers. Everything seems legit to me. The sounds aren't the greatest, but I was shocked that Oleg finally used some realistic audio rather than recordings of his electric razors and lawnmower. The ballastics are very well-written, and the damage model is most impressive. AI is much better than 1946, but I do notice that AI can do some whacky, unrealistic maneuvers sometimes (so far it hasn't been too bad here -- no worse than old IL-2). Like I said before, CEM is pretty amazing. Now I REALLY feel like I'm flying a real 109, and I feel overloaded and burdened with most of the tasks that weigh on you in the real thing (not fun for most people -- sheer ecstasy for a sadistic 109-perv like me lol). Other games (ESPECIALLY that piece of junk called "WWII Online") always made me mad because the 109 was not properly modeled or represented, and Allied planes (like the Spit) were serious OVER-modeled. But not CoD. I'm getting nearly perfect historical performance out of my winged beast, and making mincemeat of Hurris and Spits galore. This sim still needs a lot more fine-tuning and work, and is definitely a WIP, but I love it! I'm not giving it an A+ yet, but it's a solid A or A-, because nothing competes with it. And hurray for the fact that this is a Battle of Britain sim!!! :OO
And finally: graphics... They're very nice! The skins on planes seem a bit bland, but that's easily fixable (by us!). The cockpits are breath-taking. The water, vegetation, cities, etc are all excellent. I'm able to run the game with everything maxed out, no problem. And my PC doesn't get near as hot as it does running ARMA II. Of course, my system may be considered "uber++" by most folks. It's a custom software development machine I built myself last year for a couple thousand $. Here are my specs:
*Gigabyte mobo
*Intel i7-980 Quad
*nVidia GTX-580
*12GB DDR3 RAM (3x 4GB sticks, one slot still open)
*Windows 7
*Apevia Case w/ 4 cooling fans
Game runs smooth as silk on this machine. Everything to the max+, except I set trees to "high" instead of "very high" because it lets FRAPS capture video more smoothly. Turned the anti-epilepsy filter off because I don't need it. Using low MSAA settings because I don't ever see jaggies in this game to begin with, and why not keep my machine cooler? Dunno what else to say except it runs great but Steam sucks!
Regards,
keinmann
I picked up CoD at Best Buy over the weekend for $54. I was very worried that the sim would suck due to many negative reviews I saw online. One of the things that worried me most was the reported "Steam-ization" of the game. But I looked all over the back of the box and read the system requirements, and it said nothing about Steam! If it had, I probably would have done what I do every time I picked up a cool-looking game and see "Steam account required" on it: put it back on the shelf and walk away. So I bought CoD and went on my merry way home, hoping that the months that had passed since release day had brought some good bug fixes and patches.
When I got home I was FURIOUS when I saw Steam pop up on my screen, and I said to myself "This *BETTER* be worth it!" It was a pain to set the game up, as always with Steam(ing Poo). After I got the game installed I had to sit up for 5hrs and 24mins for a lousy Steam update -- so I didn't even get to try CoD until after 6am! When I finally got to playing, the first difficult thing was getting my control system set up. I have a joystick + throttle and rudder pedal setup, and it took me a while to tweak everyhing out: no big deal, because original IL-2 was the same way. Then I spent some time fiddling with graphics settings, testing some planes and "breaking in" the sim...
The first thing I realized when trying my first complete "solo" in the 109E was that this was NOT the old IL-2! Whoa, my engine won't crank at the press of a button!
hock: It took me a second to realize the game had clickable cockpits and almost everything was operable and life-like! Not to worry: I know the 109 cockpit like the back of my hand. Open fuel, full open water & oil radiators, squeeze a little fuel down the line, open the canopy, lean out and get a good look around my plane, switch on my magnetos, full toe brakes, throttle at 5% and fire it up! By now I'd already realized how complex "Complex Engine Management" was in CoD, because I'd done a few "quick missions" in Hurris and Spits and burned them up lol... so I knew to let the engine warm up a second. Once I was up to 40C on my oil I was satisfied, and I locked my toes down on the brakes, powered up and let go. I was bouncing up and down as I rolled forward, and I thought to myself: "WOW! This is nice!". Some nose-heavy trim and a little forward pressure on the stick and my tail was up, and I was keepin 'er straight with rudder. Just like the real thing, I didn't need to pull up once I got to speed: she just lifts off into the air and you need to cut power, trim down and raise the gear.I took it out over the channel and got a little alt under my wings, and tried some basic maneuvers. MUCH more life-like than the original IL-2!!! I feel like I'm flying the real thing; save G-force effects on my physical body and not actually dying when bullets hit me lol. The CEM in this sim is truly a blast, and very well done. Only the anthropomorphic control thing annoys me. It's not that bad in the 109, but sometimes it can just be silly. Like when you're lowering your slow *** flaps on a landing approach and desperately need to add throttle, by the foolish pilot just keeps on rolling out the flaps and stalls and crashes. It really kills me (quite literally) in the Hurricane. But now that I'm used to it, it's not so bad in the 109.
After flying around a few minutes over the Channel, I came back in to land. Just like the start-up and takeoff procedure, landing also felt very life-like and was much more impressive than the old IL-2! I made quite a beautiful landing for my first 109 flight ever in this sim. It could've been better, but it wasn't bad. I wonder, how many other people land their first time without mishap or incident?! :wink: I actually made a video of the entire flight with FRAPS, and have it on my spare HDD (I'll show it off if anyone wants to see heheh).
Now that I've got quite a few sleepless hours of gameplay under my exhausted belt, I must say that this sim is pretty damn good!
I think that either the negative reviews were overdone, or the latest updates/patches have rectified most/many of the things which grieved our fellow simmers. Everything seems legit to me. The sounds aren't the greatest, but I was shocked that Oleg finally used some realistic audio rather than recordings of his electric razors and lawnmower. The ballastics are very well-written, and the damage model is most impressive. AI is much better than 1946, but I do notice that AI can do some whacky, unrealistic maneuvers sometimes (so far it hasn't been too bad here -- no worse than old IL-2). Like I said before, CEM is pretty amazing. Now I REALLY feel like I'm flying a real 109, and I feel overloaded and burdened with most of the tasks that weigh on you in the real thing (not fun for most people -- sheer ecstasy for a sadistic 109-perv like me lol). Other games (ESPECIALLY that piece of junk called "WWII Online") always made me mad because the 109 was not properly modeled or represented, and Allied planes (like the Spit) were serious OVER-modeled. But not CoD. I'm getting nearly perfect historical performance out of my winged beast, and making mincemeat of Hurris and Spits galore. This sim still needs a lot more fine-tuning and work, and is definitely a WIP, but I love it! I'm not giving it an A+ yet, but it's a solid A or A-, because nothing competes with it. And hurray for the fact that this is a Battle of Britain sim!!! :OO And finally: graphics... They're very nice! The skins on planes seem a bit bland, but that's easily fixable (by us!). The cockpits are breath-taking. The water, vegetation, cities, etc are all excellent. I'm able to run the game with everything maxed out, no problem. And my PC doesn't get near as hot as it does running ARMA II. Of course, my system may be considered "uber++" by most folks. It's a custom software development machine I built myself last year for a couple thousand $. Here are my specs:
*Gigabyte mobo
*Intel i7-980 Quad
*nVidia GTX-580
*12GB DDR3 RAM (3x 4GB sticks, one slot still open)
*Windows 7
*Apevia Case w/ 4 cooling fans
Game runs smooth as silk on this machine. Everything to the max+, except I set trees to "high" instead of "very high" because it lets FRAPS capture video more smoothly. Turned the anti-epilepsy filter off because I don't need it. Using low MSAA settings because I don't ever see jaggies in this game to begin with, and why not keep my machine cooler? Dunno what else to say except it runs great but Steam sucks!
Regards,
keinmann